Gilbert: Final Four site a ripoff

Atlanta has got to be the worst city in America in which to stage the NCAA men's basketball Final Four.

Traffic control in and around the Georgia Dome is the worst I've ever encountered at a major national sports event. There is no accommodation for the handicapped. Taxi cabs are not allowed near the arena. Worse, police can't tell you where to catch one.

The food is greasy and cold - and expensive ($9.50 for a hamburger, $5 for a soft drink). Worst, some of the supposedly best seats in the house (courtside) are at least 75-100 yards from the action with no elevation and poor line of sight. I should have remembered the nightmare of covering the 1977 Tennessee-UCLA game and SEC tournaments in the Georgia Dome.

Early integration

The Michigan-Louisville championship game reminded old-timers of that night 50 years ago when Final Four fans saw for the first time something they now take for granted.

At the opening tip of Loyola of Chicago vs. Cincinnati, for the NCAA crown, seven of the 10 players on the floor were black. When Loyola's lone white starter was ejected, Loyola became the first major college team to have five blacks on the tournament floor at one time.

It was the height of the civil rights movement. James Meredith a few months earlier had enrolled at Ole Miss, and the ensuing riots led President Kennedy to call out 30,000 federal troops to restore order.

A few months after the tournament, four young black girls were killed in a bombing at Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church.

SEC see-er

ESPN's Mark Schlabach, who's been covering SEC football for a ton of years, offers a couple of predictions about the 2013 football season. He sees SEC winning an eighth consecutive national championship, but he hedges on who will win the SEC title: Alabama or Texas A&M in the West or Florida, Georgia or South Carolina in the East. He says the SEC champion will be play Oregon for the national title.

Schlabach also predicts former Tennessee coach Lane Kiffin will be fired by Southern Cal.

Double no-hitter

Funny what intriguing items the New York Times sports research department comes up with.

On Aug 24, 1992, Clearwater beat Winter Haven 1-0 in the Class-A Florida State League. It is noteworthy because neither team got a hit. The only run came in the seventh inning on a pair of walks and a pair of sacrifice bunts.

On Aug. 20, 1953, in the New York-Penn League, the Bradford (Penn.) team beat Batavia (N.Y.) 1-0 in nine innings. The closest thing to a major league double no-hitter was on May 2, 1917, when Cincinnati's Fred Toney and Chicago's Hippo Vaughn each pitched nine hitless innings. The Reds got two hits off Vaughn in the 10th to win 1-0. Toney did not allow a hit.

Re-Vol-ving door

It must be something in the water. The Tennessee Vol football program has had a flurry of turnaround hires-and-fires since Jan. 1. The latest is J.R. Sandlin, who was hired from Alabama to be Tennessee's recruiting director.

There was no explanation for the abrupt departure. Coach Butch Jones simply said: "J.R. has moved on and is no longer part of the program." It can't be that he didn't know how to recruit. At Alabama, he helped recruit the top-ranked classes in 2011 and 2012.

Tennessee Vol baseball fans have got to be wondering if athletics director Joan Cronan made the right decision in 2011 when she hired coach Dave Serrano, a former Vol assistant who built a national powerhouse at Cal State-Fullerton. His first-year Vols struggled in 2012 and are even worse now (13-17, 3-9 SEC). After losing three last weekend to South Carolina, including 19-2 on Sunday, Serrano apologized to "anyone who has ever worn this uniform and represented this university."

He released a lot of last year's Vols, and the 2013 is stocked with many freshmen. But the bottom line is brutal: The Vols don't win.

Columnist Bob Gilbert - former Associated Press writer, retired University of Tennessee news director and author of the Bob Neyland biography - can be reached at rwgilbert@charter.net.

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Gilbert: Final Four site a ripoff

Atlanta has got to be the worst city in America in which to stage the NCAA men's basketball Final Four.